On the first day of December 1904, the last day of a carefully planned urban utopia brought together people from many different places and backgrounds to experience the world’s fair for the last time.1 At least two-hundred-thousand people gathered on the grounds of the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition sharing mixed feelings of sadness, wonder, and nostalgia. Some visitors traveled a couple blocks to see the fair and its president David R. Francis for the last time. Others would soon be leaving the United States after seven months of transiting between cultural universes by walking. It was the so-called Francis Day: the grand spectacle of colors, shapes, tastes, and sounds was about to vanish from the city as if it never happened.
For the last time, fair officials marched from the administration entrance through Skinker Road. After stopping at the Administration building, Francis and other commissioners continued the march towards the Louisiana Monument at the core of the fairgrounds. Behind the monument, separated by the Great Basin, two of the main exhibit buildings, surrounded by thoughtfully designed water ways, contributed to a generalized sense of order.2 Francis, Governor Dockery, and other members of the local political elite stood in front of the north side of the monument and addressed the crowd with their closing speeches. Governor Dockery said that the fair’s lesson was made evident to every visiting foreigner: that the United States was “the greatest nation in all the world.” He also made sure to address the foreign commissioners gathered around the monument to warn them about an ongoing “war of peaceful conquest.” That war, he argued, would prove to every nation in the world the United States’ economic and commercial supremacy.3